Had this simple little drifting-in-space image in my head for a while and wanted to put it down into words. It kind of put itself together while I was working on this music, so I'd say it goes with it and its abridged/remastered version.

I had to do some research to get all the physics and math right. Playing with the language of "up" and "down" in different gravitational settings was kind of fun. :3

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Flight to Morningstar

The public space taking up most of the room of the village-sized cylindrical station is lit by reflected and refracted sunlight streaming in through the transparent bands along the rim, with a narrow shadow cast by a thin axis along the center of the cylinder about two kilometers over our heads. Solar Class stations like mine generate gravity by centrifugal force, so “down” is technically “out.” We walk around along the rim, where the facilities and apartment rooms are built, and the light bands double as roads for walking and cycling. It’s energy-efficient that way. When Morningstar is close by, I can see it through the bands below me as a tiny speck of light near the sun—the only one not blotted out by its glare as it shines through the wistful coyote reflected back at me by the wandering refractions, the fur on his lean frame all swept up from biking a whole lap around the station and from general lazy unkemptness. Meh, at least he’s clean.

I don’t travel by capsule very often. It’s not that I’m claustrophobic, and besides, the whole top part of the vehicle is just a thick layer of glass, so really you’re seeing the vast empty space out there all throughout the trip. And it’s not that I don’t like the open space either—it’s quite beautiful. I think what I don’t like is the feeling of being in both a tiny space and a huge one at the same time. The contradiction is too overwhelming way out here. But it’s faster than the big commercial shuttles, and private use of the terminals makes it much cheaper, too, and easier to use. In fact, there’s a terminal in the basement of every apartment room. It’s a solo trip through and through.

I sent Kevin a message last night telling him I was going to take a few days’ break to go visit him at the satellite station around Morningstar. He's my big cuddly lion. Technically, we do have a universal calendar, but in these tiny quiet space communities we usually just go by our individual sleep schedules to measure the days. Mine syncs up with his pretty quickly when we’re together. For obvious reasons.

I wanted to take advantage of Morningstar’s proximal season while he’s only about a minute away by signal and about 30 hours away by capsule. My station is a Solar Class, meaning rather than claiming a planet it’s in free orbit around the sun, and its year is only a few days longer than Morningstar’s which means it takes a very long time for us to line up again. Despite being about the size of a small town, there’s so few of us here. It doesn’t take a large head count to maintain today’s technology, and the technology does practically everything needed to keep us alive, including self-maintenance and recalibration. And with the population so spread out all over the star cluster now there aren’t really any large crowds anymore. Life in space is a fairly sleepy one these days, quite the opposite of the rigorous setup of captains and ensigns it used to be centuries ago.

It’s been too long since I felt that big lion’s warm teddybear embrace, and I needed to see him again. In the message I gave him the terminal address I’d be entering at his station according to my own terminal’s system. We agreed to have him meet me there, and it’s going to be a public address at his station. It sounds like he misses his coyote, too.

I pack what few things I’d need for the visit, eat, make my bed, get dressed, and go downstairs to the terminal.

The capsule is in the form of a long stylus and it rests in the bay along the side of the terminal, which stretches out the length of the vehicle. It’s a low ceiling and narrow walls. Lights along the corners keep everything warmly lit without too much glare. The terminal is controlled by a panel on a stand right in front of the bay carrying the capsule, and punching in my ID and the destination address was all that was needed to unlock the hatch. It’s a small enough capsule that my luggage goes in with me rather than taking a separate compartment—the capsule’s as long as it is because the front and back are counterweights designed to keep it properly orientated in space, so really the only cargo room in it is right in the middle. I pop open the hatch, stuff my luggage in the front and strapped it in, and climb inside. The space is small enough that I’m lying down inside it like a coffin. I strap myself in, which activates the little panel to my right, and I use that to shut the hatch, cutting me off from the outside air of the terminal, and to start the launch procedure.

The capsule starts to descend into the bay carrying it, beneath the terminal, until its warm light is out of sight and I’m being surrounded by the dark machinery behind the scenes of the station. The descent ends, the capsule hesitates a few moments, and then I feel it starting to rotate down until it’s aligned vertically, so that my bound feet and tail are over my head, which starts to fill up with blood. I can feel my pulse going in my neck. I’m reminded of pictures of medieval torture chambers where victims are tied onto the frames upside-down. Used to be some animals just wouldn’t have the physical fitness to do things like this due to bad food, bad exercise, bad oxygen, bad genes. But today’s medicine and air, combined with genetic cropping out of diseases and allergies, and recent interest in cutting down on energy consumption, as well as the simple fact that space being as vast as it is makes for very large stations and lots of walking around from place to place, all comes together to make us generally much healthier. So we can do things like be held upside-down inside machines for an indefinite period of time. Still, the basic idea seems like some kind of torture device designed to make me suffer.

The capsule descends some more into the lowest level of the station, which is the launch chamber, illuminated in a violent red hue. When the descent is complete, the vehicle sets into place with a thunderous rumble, and then everything falls dead quiet in the angry red glow. Since the station’s orbiting, the terminal can only shoot me out to Morningstar at intervals just over five minutes, when my side of the station is turned that direction. So it has to wait until the next opportunity, and since I hadn’t been keeping track of the time it could be any moment.

I strain and try to see the starry scene over my head. The glass pane is flat, which makes it very difficult to see much above my head or below my feet and tail. I try collapsing and shifting the weight of my upper body up to my feet, straining to see the open blackness I know is down there above my head. But there isn’t enough room in the capsule. Afraid of injuring myself in that position from the force of the launch, I straighten back out, put my body to rest, and wait.

A brief, consuming pulse. And then the station is completely gone and I’m surrounded by blank, starry space.

So now it’s just me inside the capsule inside the infinite expanse. Sometimes I think of it as the interior of an extremely large sphere containing all the lifeless galaxies and stars, and me and this tiny capsule drifting aimlessly, nowhere to come from, nowhere to arrive. And all my memories of the past and expectations of the future were deceptive mistakes placed in me, and the present moment of nothingness is the only reality. And this lonely, shivering little coyote is the only thing alive in this enormous sphere. Lonely enough and hurting enough to concoct a wild fantasy of memories in the past and expectations in the future of big stations and animals like myself. Someone to interact with. A big guy, with a mane. And a soft, deep, loving voice. And all the warm fur I could ever want. But of course, it’s all just in my head, and in reality it’s just me and the capsule and the sphere. I was never born, and I will never die.

I can never sleep very well in these cramped things.

I recently read that, centuries ago, before they perfected inertial dampening, they would just cut off the pilots’ legs and replace them with prosthetics to keep all their blood from shifting to their feet during spaceflight. They had some diagrams of that with a fox’s legs. I think that fox was important—my history was never very good. He was a soldier of some kind. Ah well, history all sounds the same to me: violence and bloodshed and problems. And it was a pretty violent time back then, too—not a very inhabitable culture. We’re much better off now, I guess. If you’re not on a planet and not in laid-back station life, then you’re an explorer. And even then we’ve confirmed a long time ago that there’s no one else out there in this enormous galaxy. No aliens. Just us. So there isn’t much to find out there except minerals, starlight, and more space.

At least we’re mature enough nowadays that there’s no more danger of nuking the whole animal kingdom to smithereens. We’ve caught up to our technology in level of intelligence, I guess. Or there’s just so few of us left per cubic light-year after we all spread out, and most of us just breed for pleasure rather than for offspring so our population stays at a luxurious minimum, and with the population that sparse there’s too few of us to make a country.

Without a planet, it really feels like the entire universe is just a bubble of nothing floating in a totally empty blankness extending forever in all sides. Containing nothing but you. And that’s everything there is in all of existence—yourself and a scattering of specks of light. It can be terrifying sometimes, but I love it. It makes station life like something out of a dream. Better, even, since you’re the one seeing the nothing that’s really out there, and the bustling planets are the ones lost inside of themselves. As dreamlike as it is, it’s more real than what planet folk take to be reality. I guess that’s why we have that stereotype nowadays that space folk are generally mentally spacy: “spacies” they call us.

I look at the stars. There’s way too many of them to make shapes. Forget even starting to think about trying to count them. Some of them are slightly bluer, and others slightly redder. The inside of my head gets all warm and my thoughts start to disorient in a boiling sea of meaningless chatter. . . .





I startle awake, my mind jolted out of some weird music with a tone that sounded like it was played by a hurdy gurdy. How long was I out? I look around, and of course the stars are exactly the same pattern as when I fell asleep, since the capsule’s always in the same orientation.

My head aches, and my muzzle is all stuffed up from the cramped air. Sleeping anywhere other than my usual bed always makes some pretty infected nightmares I can never remember and I wake up sore.

There’s a soft buzzing sound and a little blinking light in the corner, signifying that the capsule’s about to arrive at the station. That’s what woke me up. Good, I’m almost there.

Did I really sleep for 28 hours? Was I really that tired? God, my head hurts. . . .

There’s something bright out there over my head. I look up and find the magnificent crescent-lit ball that is the planet Morningstar. A few minutes later, the entire starry scene disappears into a blur of dark machinery, shortly followed by a pulsing shock of motion stopping the capsule. The mechanical chamber is being periodically lit and dimmed by a blinking red light as the capsule’s being rotated until I’m oriented resting on my back by the gravity here.

The capsule’s correctives never went off the whole trip. If they did they would have suddenly filled the inside with the sound of alarms, and that would have definitely woken me up, as light a sleeper as I know myself to be. But usually the trajectory is so well programmed by the terminal system, predicting the gravitational field, obstructions, and so forth, that we rarely ever need the correctives anymore.

After the chamber filled with air, the capsule starts moving again, being carried along the mechanical corridor until it passes through a wall and the dark ominous machinery is replaced by the clean white walls of inhabitability. An unloading station.

Another minute of inactivity passes. Then something knocks on the capsule window. It’s Kevin, looking down at me and pawing playfully at the door in his leonine way I love so much. He notices I’m a little groggy from sleeping too much and gives me some peace for a minute before the door pops open, letting in some welcome outside air. I rip out of the harness and he helps me up out of the vehicle. I stagger a little, trying to make sense of gravity again, and Kevin offers me his side for support.

“I figure you’d feel like shit after a trip like that,” he says in his gentle deep voice, its organic quality resonating warmly against the artificial silence I’d felt for way too long. “Don’t you hate the capsules?”

“Yeah,” I say, voice hoarse from disuse. “It was faster though, and I really wanted to see you.” I must look like such a spacie right now. He seems to like it though, that wide chuckling grin on his muzzle.

“Here,” he says, passing me a bottle of aspirin. I take some, and then we close into our long anticipated embrace. He’s just as warm and soft as I remember him.

The loading chamber leads out to a service room, occupied by a crocodile, or alligator—some kind of crocodilian—lounging behind a desk with an open book in his claw. “Welcome to Morningstar,” he says. “Everything go alright?” As intimidating as he looks at first glance, he seems nice enough by his tone of voice.

“Good as usual,” Kevin answers, paw in mine, and we pass through.

The pyramidal Morningstar Station is attached to the planet by an elevator shaft, holding it out like a weight on a string as the planet rotates, and far enough out so that centrifugal force overcomes the planet’s own gravity and creates an artificial gravity directed away from it. The enormous triangle-paneled glass ceiling overhead the spacious public sector shows off the daybreaking sphere of life fixed way up in the crowning dominance of the station.

Kevin catches me admiring the overhead scene. “You’ve never actually been all the way up to the planet before, have you?”

“No,” I say. “Other than Redstar, I’ve never been on a planet.” Redstar had been my home for the first eight years of my life, but since then I’d been passing from station to station without ever touching my pads to natural ground.

“We can go tomorrow,” my lion suggests, holding my far shoulder in his paw. “I’ll show you all the best sights up there.”

“I’d like that.”